One Week in Paris

On her eighth day in Paris, Lauren decided to walk the Champs Elysees again. She set off at a little after eight in the morning and found herself in a charming little café by the time she was growing hungry. She paid for breakfast with the cash hanging loose in her pocket and ate it in silence while reading a Capote paperback, its folded spine falling open to the page she had stopped reading on the night before. She ate, left a tip on the table, and continued down the road where she found herself resting on the rail overlooking that brackish vein that was the Seine. The light tapped off the rippling surface as the water flowed through unstopped, and somewhere in that twisting mirror was the rough approximation of the face she recognised as her own. In the water she looked almost featureless, like a memory slowly being forgotten in a mist, and she had to pick apart her own features as they merged and flattened and fell apart and drifted.

On her ninth day in Paris, she visited a gallery. She spent several minutes at each painting, staring deep into them until the brushstrokes blurred into whipping little streaks that danced across the canvasses. She stopped in an exhibit of landscapes, grassy fields with lone trees and tranquil little rivers trickling through. Animals off in the pasture ate from the land, and birds in the sky took flight in the pleasant blue skies. In one painting, a pack of grey and white wolves tore through a winter scape, their paws beating craters into the untouched snow.

On her tenth day, which would have been her final day, she put her thumb out at the side of the road and hitchhiked her way into the countryside in the back seat of a man’s car. His name was Oscar, and he told her about his failing business and his loveless marriage while she sat in the back not responding. The world around her looked almost like one of those paintings she had looked at back at the gallery, a perfect still life that ran away past her as the car sped along. Once she was far enough outside of the city, she left Oscar mid monologue and walked the next ten miles with nothing more than her short cut jeans, white tank top, and backpack of personal belongings. Her funds had run basically dry, so even if she wanted to catch a bus back to the airport and go home, she could not have afforded fair, and the tickets would be useless once the plane left in an hour. Instead, she spent what she had left on a bottle of vodka and packed it neatly into her bag, and on the way out she stole some snacks.

On her eleventh day, she awoke from a bad sleep on a bench in a bandstand in some part of rural France she had never heard of with no idea where she was, or how she was going next. Seemingly out of nowhere, regret had set in and she was beginning to wish she could see her mother again, not that her mother wanted to see her. She stumbled blindly up the side of the road until a car pulled over and she asked for directions to the nearest town. The driver offered her a lift, but she chose not to go with him and instead kept walking. Her feet were breaking out into blisters, and the muscles up and down her legs were afire with shooting pains. Her shoulders were aching from carrying the backpack; when she was in a secluded length of road, she let it fall to the floor and dragged it by the strap.

On her twelfth day, she woke up in a bed she didn’t remember going to sleep in, but her back and legs were thanking her for finding somewhere more comfortable to sleep than the bench she had passed out on before. She discovered she was sleeping in an old woman’s house, a B&B that she couldn’t possibly afford to be staying in, and she contemplated slipping out without seeing the bill until the owner came out and explained, in a string of broken English, that she was staying for free. Lauren thanked her and accepted her offer of eggs and coffee out on the veranda welcomely. Over the breakfast table, the old woman explained her life story, and in return she was regaled with all the poor decisions that had landed Lauren in this scenic French village. From the veranda she could see a river, a mill dipped its wooden wheel into the flowing water. The old lady understood her plight, and offered to put her up, for free, until the end of the week.

On her thirteenth day, Lauren opened up her bag and looked over the extent of her worldly possessions. She had a few pairs of shorts, various underwear sets which did not match, and no remaining clean shirts. She had the bottle of vodka, from which she had been taking gulps to calm her aching nerves, and a few packs of non-assorted painkillers that she would take sparingly when the pains became unbearable. She had the Capote novel, now finished with pages hanging out where the glue had let go its grip from the tattered spine, and what remained of the stolen snacks.

On her fourteenth day she was on the road again, having left the old lady’s house without saying goodbye as she couldn’t face doing it in her current state. She walked for half the day and then found herself resting for an hour by the lake which she had been following out of the village. She threw off her trainers, and started feeding some of the pretzels from her bag to the ducks. At some point, a scrawny black cat with matted fur and a scar on his forehead crossed the park to where she was sat, it nuzzled against her bare leg for a moment and then eyed up the rest of the pretzels, a handful of which she distributed between the cat and the ducks that were hanging around the bank and even waddling up onto the grass to get closer to her. She patted the cat’s head and neck as it ate, and she whispered to it that it was all going to be okay, it had to be okay eventually. After a while she realised she may not have been talking to the cat.

On her fifteenth day, the cat was still with her. She had tried her hardest to leave it in the park, but it had refused to get further than a few paces behind her at any given time, and eventually it curled up at her feet as she slept in a clearing in the woods. For dinner, she stole a loaf of bread and some cat food and they ate together under the light of the moon. In the morning, all her clothes were coated in dirt, and she decided to stay in that outfit until she could clean all her clothes at once. She would have sat nude in a laundromat if the option came around, but she couldn’t find anywhere, and even if she could she didn’t have any money left. She petted the black cat one more time, and looked down the road ahead.